Seven Ancient Wonders (39 page)

Stretch still said nothing.

Lily looked up at him. ‘Stretch? Why . . . ?’

Stretch said softly, ‘Lily, you have to understand. I didn’t—’

Avenger grinned. ‘What is this? "Stretch"? Have you been renamed, Cohen? How positively sweet.’

He turned to Pooh Bear.’Alas, everything you say is true, Arab.
The last available Piece is to be ours, one Piece of the Capstone that will give Israel all the leverage it needs over the United States of America. Now, Captain West, if you would be so kind. Lead the way. Take us to this Piece. You work for Israel now.’

But no sooner had these words come out of his mouth than there was a great explosion from somewhere outside.

Everyone spun.

West swapped a glance with Pooh Bear.

They all listened for a moment.

Nothing.

Silence.

And then West realised: silence
was
the problem. He could no longer hear the constant
shhh
of the waterfall up at the entrance to the tunnel system.

The shooshing had stopped.

And the realisation hit.

Judah had just used explosives to divert the waterfall—
the entire waterfall
! He was opening up the entrance for a mass forced entry.

In fact, even in his wildest dreams, West still hadn’t fully imagined the scene outside.

The waterfall had indeed been diverted, by a series of expertly-laid demolition charges in the river above it. Now its triple-tiered rockface, criss-crossed with paths, lay bare and dry, in full view of the world.

But it was the immense military force massing around the base of the dry waterfall that defied imagining.

A multitude of platoons converged on the now tranquil pool at the base of the triple-tiered cliff-face. Tanks and Humvees circled behind them, while Apache and Super Stallion choppers buzzed overhead.

And commanding it all from a mobile command vehicle was Marshall Judah.

He sent his first team in from the air—they went in fast, ziplining down drop-ropes suspended from a hovering Super Stallion direct to the top tier of the dry falls, by-passing the paths.

Guns up and pumped up, they charged inside.

From their position at the far end of the quicksand cavern, West and his new group saw the Americans’ red laser-sighting beams lancing out from the entry tunnel, accompanied by fast footsteps.

‘American pigs,’ Zaeed hissed.

But then suddenly—
whump
—the Americans’ footfalls were drowned out by a much louder sound: the deep ominous grinding of a third sliding stone!

Gunfire. The Americans were firing their guns
at
the sliding stone!

Shouts.

Then running—frantic running.

Seconds later, the first desperate American trooper appeared on the ledge on his side of the cube-shaped cavern.

He peered around desperately—looking left and right, up and down—and he saw the quicksand floor far below; then he saw the handrungs in the ceiling. He leapt for them—swung from the first one to the second, grabbed the third—

—which fell out of its recess and sent the hapless commando plummeting ten storeys
straight down
.

The man screamed all the way until—
splat!
—he landed in the gelatinous floor . . . at which point he starting screaming in a whole new way.

The screams of a man caught in the grip of a force he cannot resist, a man who knows he is going to die.

His five team-mates arrived at the tunnel’s edge just in time to see him get sucked under, his mouth filling with liquid sand. Now trapped on the ledge, they glanced from the deadly handrungs back to the sliding stone, then down to the quicksand.

Two tried the handrungs.

The first man reached the sixth rung—which felled him. The second man just slipped and fell all on his own.

The other three were beaten by the sliding stone.

It burst out of the tunnel behind them like a runaway train and collected them on the way—hurling them all out into the air, sending them sailing in a high curving arc ten storeys down before they all landed together with simultaneous sandy splashes.

As the massive stone itself landed, it smacked one of the American soldiers straight under the surface. The other two bobbed on the gluggy surface for a few seconds before they too were sucked under by the hungry liquid floor.

West and his group saw it all happen.

‘That won’t happen again,’ West said to Avenger. ‘Judah sent that team in to die—a junior team without instructions, without warnings. He was just testing the trap system. When he comes in, he won’t be so foolish.’

The Israeli major nodded, turned to two of his men. ‘Shamburg. Riel. Make a rear-guard post here. Hold them off for as long as you can, then catch up.’

‘Sir!’

‘Yes, sir!’

Avenger then grabbed Lily from West, held her roughly by the collar. ‘Lead the way, Captain.’

They hadn’t taken ten steps down the next tunnel before they heard gunfire from the two rear-guards.

Sustained gunfire.

More Americans had arrived at the sand cavern—having probably completely disabled the sliding stone mechanism by now.

Two men wouldn’t hold them off for long.

The Giant Stairway

After passing through the short tunnel, West led his now-larger group into another cube-shaped chamber—about fifty feet high, wide and long—only this time, his tunnel opened onto the chamber from the
base,
not up near the ceiling.

Before him was a rail-less stone path which hugged the chamber’s left-hand wall. A quicksand pool lay to the right, filling the rest of the floor.

The low stone path, however, led to something quite astonishing.

Seven giant stone steps that rose magnificently upward to a doorway cut
into
the ceiling of this chamber. Each step must have been at least seven feet high, and they all bristled with holes and recesses of various shapes and sizes, some of them door-sized, others basketball-sized, every one of them no doubt fitted with deadly snares just waiting to be triggered.

To the left of the giant stairway, flush against it, was the same stone wall that flanked the path. It was also dotted with variously-sized trap-holes. To the right of the stairs, there was nothing but empty air.

The intent was clear: if you were thrown off the stairs, you fell all the way down to the floor, made entirely of quicksand.

‘It’s the
levels,’
Zaeed realised.

‘What?’ West said.

‘Remember the progress report I found, the sketch of the Gardens under construction. These steps weren’t originally steps at all. They were the step-like
levels
that led up to the main archway of the cave. Imhotep III converted them into this ascending stairway trap.’

‘Clever.’

Zaeed said, ‘If I’m right, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon lie beyond that doorway in the ceiling.’

Avenger pushed West forward—while maintaining his grip on Lily. ‘Captain West, please. Time is of the essence. Lead the way.’

West did so, taking on the giant steps.

He encountered traps on nearly every one.

Blasts of quicksand, trapdoors, upward-springing spikes designed to lance through his grasping hands, even a one-ton boulder that rolled suddenly across the fifth step.

But through skill and speed and quick thinking, he got past them all, until finally he stepped up into the opening in the ceiling, emerging on a dark platform which he sensed opened onto a wider, infinitely more vast space. And so he lit a flare and held it aloft and for one brief moment in time, standing alone in the darkness, Jack West Jr beheld a sight no-one had seen for over 2,500 years.

Standing there before him, in all their incredible glory, were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

He needed eight more flares to illuminate the gargantuan cavern fully.

It was better described as a
super
cavern, for it was the size of twenty football fields laid out in a grid. It was perfectly square in shape, and its floor was made up entirely of quicksand—giving it the appearance of a vast flat
lake
of yellow sand.

And rising up from this sand-lake, in the exact centre of the supercavern, was a fifteen-storey ziggurat—the variety of stepped pyramid common in ancient Mesopotamia.

But it was the natural feature that lay above the ziggurat that inspired sheer
wonder
.

An absolutely immense limestone stalactite hung from the ceiling of the cave directly above the ziggurat. It was so huge, its mass so great, it dwarfed the ziggurat. Perhaps 25 storeys tall, it looked like an inverted
mountain
suspended from the ceiling of the supercavern, its pointed tip reaching down to meet the upwardly-pointed peak of the ziggurat on the ground.

But this incredible natural feature had been modified by the hand of man—thus lifting it out of ‘incredible’ and into the category of ‘wondrous’.

A pathway had been hewn into its outer flank—in some sections it was flat and curving, while in others it took the form of short flights of steps. This path spiralled up and around the exterior of the great stalactite, rising ever higher, heading for the ceiling of the cavern.

Dotting this path were nearly a hundred semi-circular archways, each archway containing vines and shrubs and trees and flowers—
all of them overgrown to excess, all hanging out and over the edge of the stalactite, dangling precariously 300 feet above the world.

It defied belief.

It was stupendous.

A truly hanging garden.

The
Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

As the others joined him, West noticed the wall soaring into the upper reaches of the supercavern immediately above and behind them.

While it was made of densely-packed bricks, West could make out at its edges the traces of another
earlier
structure, a structure that had been trapezoidal in shape and huge—300 feet high—like a giant doorway of some sort that had been filled in with these bricks.

West grabbed Zaeed’s sketch from his pocket—the drawing of the great stalactite (shrouded in scaffolding) visible from outside the mountain
through
a window-like trapezoidal archway: